Back in April of this year, United States super-patriot and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-alQ) said this about the Iraq war and the 'surge' plan: "I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week". Even more impressive than Harry's proclamation was the fact that he made it before the surge was even in place. Maybe he consulted Miss Cleo for the info, or maybe the DNC, Crystal Ball Division. I'm not sure, but the man sure has some impressive psychic powers. Other than being totally wrong, Reid was totally right.

Valerie Plame's book, Fair Game: My Life As A Spy, My Betrayal By The White House, has been released. In it, Mrs. Plame, the wife of liar Joseph Wilson, accuses the Bush administration of maliciously outing her to destroy her career as payback for Wilson's op-ed in the NY Times that called the Bush administration liars for the famous 16 words contained in one of Bush's pre-war speeches about Iraq: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa". Plame also contends that her 'outing' compromised CIA intelligence operations and endangered lives.

Adding weight to the theory that far left liberalism is just a case of arrested adolescence, the loons have been acting out and disrupting class more than usual lately. From the bloody hands assault on Condoleeza Rice, to the Code Pink disruption of the Petraeus hearings, to the 'don't tase me, bro' guy, to the shout down of David Horowitz at Emory University, to the 9/11 conspiracy nuts on the Bill Maher show, to the protesters outside of Nancy Pelosi's house, it is clear that the moonbats think freedom of speech means the freedom to interject themselves into any venue at any time. They also think freedom of speech means the freedom to stop any speech that they don't like, which is a very old leftist tune. Just like Chavez in Venezuela nationalizes the radio stations to prevent any anti-Chavez sentiment from being heard on public airwaves, so does the american left propose the (Un)Fairness Doctrine in an attempt to muzzle the conservative dominance of talk radio. Ah, can't you just smell the democracy ? The left touts civil rights, tolerance, and diversity -- but not for you, you nasty conservative devils. You neither, Christians. The left loves the free exchange of ideas, as long as they are all leftist ideas. If you don't believe me, go to the nearest university and find out for yourself. Somehow, our universities can tolerate Islamic fascists like the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, but our universities can't tolerate conservatives like David Horowitz speaking about Islamic fascists like Ahmadinejad. If anyone can find a nugget of sense in that, please explain it to me.

If you go to virtually any poverty-ridden inner city hellhole in america, you will find it is run by Democrats. If you go to virtually any inner city school board in america, you will find it is also run by Democrats, and has been for 50 years. Democrats pretty much have a stranglehold on our system of socialized public education. Teacher's unions are part of the Democratic base, and among the Dems largest campaign contributors. As a result of all this Democratic expertise, design, and control, we have inner city public schools where half the students don't graduate, and the half that do barely learn a damned thing. We have schools that are nothing more than day-care warehouses for the next generation of poor folk in america. It's a national disgrace, but Democrats try as hard as they can to maintain the status quo. They resist school vouchers, charter schools, and merit raises for teachers. They make it nearly impossible to remove bad teachers, they coddle bad students, they dumb down the curriculum, and there is precious little discipline. The Democrats keep calling for more money and more money for our schools, even though americans already pay more for education that any other country in the world. That money goes to the adults in our school system, to the unions and the bureaucracy, but it doesn't ever seem to improve the educational process for the students. Our national inner city public school system is an unqualified failure, and is just as responsible as the welfare state for keeping poor people poor. The next time you hear some fool talk in favor of socialized medicine, tell him to look at how socialized education has gone.

In the political wars, Democrats like to paint Republicans as white male chauvinist christian bigots who are in the pocket of rich people and don't give a single crap about the poor. Democrats paint themselves as the compassionate good people who are fighting for the rights of the little guy against those same evil Republicans. On this battlefront, the Democrats are winning (though not as much as they were when they controlled ALL the media), because that perception is pretty widely accepted. But who really helps the poor the most ? Painting with the broad brush, and granting that there are many exceptions, the solutions of the two parties to poverty are these: Republicans believe economic growth leads to expanded opportunity, for the poor along with everyone else. It's the principle of the rising tide that lifts all boats. The Democrats believe in more government intervention in the form of government programs to assist people out of poverty. I'd say both sides believe education is key to lowering poverty.

Now that Bush's veto of the Democrat's S-CHIP expansion has been upheld, and the Democrats have had their hissy fit on the floor of congress yesterday, with one highlight (lowlight) being nutjob Pete Stark (D-Cal) making absurd comments about Bush "killing innocent people for his own amusement", maybe now the Democrats can quit playing political games and a reauthorization of S-CHIP can be worked out. I'm pretty tired of the Dem's tactic of using families that are already covered under S-CHIP as human shields to prevent any real dialogue from taking place on the issue. This vote on the veto override should have taken place two weeks ago, but the Democrats wanted to play the 'Republicans hate children' card for all it was worth, so they delayed the vote. I can see why the Dems mantra for S-CHIP has been 'For The Children', because their behavior has been totally infantile.

Those wild and crazy liberals keep telling us there is no terrorist threat, or if there is, it's a minor thing, kind of like catching a cold. They say Bush, Cheney, and company, those neocon devils from the evil empire, are just trying to scare us into giving away all our rights, so the Bushies can then force us all to go work on the Deathstar or something (to add to the horror, the Deathstar will be a non-union shop !). John Edwards famously illustrated how completely unfit he is to assume the role of commander in chief by once referring to the war on terrorism as 'a bumper sticker'. As I mentioned yesterday, Paul Krugman,

My friend Roysoldboy sent me an e-mail this morning that I have to share with you. Roy got it from the man behind the Redstate blog, who also goes by the name of Flagstaffan for any of you who have been on any of the Mclatchey forums. I hope he doesn't mind me telling you that. I don't think he will.

If you haven't seen the Real Time With Bill Maher show yet, you are missing something. I'm not sure exactly what you're missing, but you're missing something....maybe the downfall of western civilization (but funny !). I watched part of a rerun of the october 12th episode on HBO last night while I was waiting for the Indians/Red Sox game to start (Go Tribe !). The basic premise of the Bill Maher show is: Republicans suck, Christians are stupid and delusional, americans are a bunch of ignorant hicks, and marijuana is cool. Needless to say, liberals LOVE the show, since it reflects their values. I watched this particular episode because I wanted to see if New York Times columnist Paul Krugman could possibly be as wrong about everything in person as he is in print. He was one of the panel guests, along with Joy Behar, alleged comedienne from The View, and MSNBC's Tucker Carlson, who played the token conservative, even though he isn't that conservative. A centrist on Real Time looks like a hard right-winger compared to a typical assemblage of Maher moonbats. Once, Christopher Hitchens played the role of the 'evil' conservative on the show, even though he is a socialist and an atheist. The conservative role was forced upon Hitchens for the sole reason that he acknowledges that Islamic fascism exists and realizes it's important that we fight against it. That's all it takes to be considered a crazed conservative fundamentalist fascist extremist by Maher's people. The audience booed Hitchens so much that Hitchens actually flipped them off at one point. I think that might have been a tv talk show first, unless you count the Jerry Springer type shows (I don't), where it's part of the act.

Global warming cult leader and rightful heir to the american throne, Al Gore, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, proving once again that who you know is infinitely preferable to what you know when it comes to the Nobel committee. Gore takes his place in the pantheon of illustrious peace activists and Nobel winners from the past, among them Yassir Arafat (PLO), Jimmy Carter (PLO), and probably David Duke (KKK). Co-winners of the peace prize were the IPCC, which I think stands for Interdependent Partisans for Crowd Control. The IPCC consists of a group of absolutely objective scientists whose grant money and careers depend on finding that man-made global warming is real and that it is a serious, serious problem. Using the techno-speak of Der Leader Gore, the IPCC wanted to know if "the planet has a fever". After studying the data (and before studying the data too), shazaam !, the IPCC found that, yes-sirree-bob, man-made global warming IS real, and it's going to pretty much destroy the earth. They also found that lots of IPCC funding increases would be needed to study the problem further. It's kind of a circle of life thing. We are not allowed to ask these same scientists why, only some 30 short years ago, they thought the planet had a chill, because back then they were predicting an ice age. Looking behind the curtain is strictly forbidden. I'm told a few years at a liberal re-education camp (american university) will usually cure this tendency toward remembering the inconvenient truths of history.

There is a fraud being perpetrated in parts of the US media. Actually, there are several of them, but one is the contention that the Bush administration has illegally gone where no government had gone before by wiretapping international phone calls from suspected terrorists into or out of america without first obtaining a warrant. Those of a certain political stripe call this 'domestic spying on american citizens'. You know right away you are dealing with someone who might have their own agenda when they refer to international calls as 'domestic', and monitoring foreign terrorist suspects as 'spying on american citizens', but those are only minor spin points. Aside from the attempted partisan linguistics, one of the real questions is - are the charges true ? Is Bush the first president to cross the privacy line by spying ?

I don't usually write about religion, but I stumbled across a CNN article about Ann Coulter making comments concerning Christianity and Judaism. Notice the hate directed at Coulter in the reader comments after the CNN article. I have to admit, I was kind of shocked at the reaction to Coulter's words. I understand the need for tolerance, but it strikes me that a lot of people are calling Coulter a bigot and demanding that she lose her job here all because Coulter is MOUTHING THE TENETS OF CHRISTIANITY. Here is the crux of what she said (Deutsch is the interviewer, who is Jewish):

If Hillary Clinton was elected president and all her campaign promises were enacted, it would cost the taxpayers an additional $724 billion during her first term, and that's only if you are naive enough to believe Hillary's health care plan will only cost $110 billion per year, as Hillary claims. Analysts say it will cost much more. Government programs invariably cost far more than the advertised price tag. That's part of the come-on. You can find a breakdown of all Hillary's new spending here.

Since the Democrats captured congress in 2006, Henry Waxman (D-Cal) has been investigating alleged government misconduct. Actually, he's been doing it for 8 years, but when the Democrats took control, Waxman became chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, which gave him subpoena power and free reign to investigate, in Waxman's own words "everything that the government is involved with". The targets of Waxman's probes have been the Plame farce, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, the mischaracterization of Pat Tillman's death, the 'heroics' of Jessica Lynch, the government of Iraq, Walter Reed Hospital, construction and hiring practices at the US Embassy in Baghdad, Defense and State contracting practices, and Halliburton. Time magazine, in a misleading piece of admiration masquerading as reporting, called Grand Inquisitor Waxman, The Scariest Guy In Washington, due to his carte blanche investigative authority. Oliver North wrote an article about Waxman that offsets some of Time's partisan hype.

There is a case about Indiana voter ID law coming before the Supreme Court. Under voter ID legislation, voters would have to show proper photo ID in order to vote. Conservatives generally support this law, saying that it will reduce voter fraud. Liberals generally oppose the law, claiming that voter fraud is their constitutional right.

I wanted Barack Obama to be the real deal, I really did. He was the guy who was going to bridge the partisan divide and bring the people together in a new kind of political framework. He was going to leave the old political infighting behind and create a new dynamic of cooperation. We could use someone like that, kind of a JFK for the 21st century. That would be alright. Unlike John Freakin' Kerry, Obama's initials weren't actually J-F-K, but that's not really a dealbreaker. He was someone fresh, a new voice, a change from decade three of the same old dueling Bush/Clinton dynasties. As an aside, I hear Jeb's son has political ambitions. COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU IN 2016, after the Hillary fatigue is well set in (though Hillary fatigue set in for me around 1993).

Hillary Clinton, the media anointed 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, wants to give every newborn a $5,000 government bond. Fox reports on Hillary's proposal here. There are 4 million babies born in the USA each year, with that number on the rise, especially if we don't control the illegal immigration problem.

We should have seen this coming ever since since the 'General Betray Us' ad that Moveon.org ran in the NY Times at the discounted 'comrade' rate. Knowing full well that they stepped in a deep pile of unamerican doo-doo over the handling of the Petraeus report, along with their many other assorted comments that have been seen as less than supportive of the troops during the Iraq war, I can just picture a cadre of frenetic Democratic operatives poring through tapes and transcripts of conservative commentary, looking for something/anything they could use to spin the political top back the other way.

That is how Democrats are framing the debate over the proposed $35 billion expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that Bush is threatening to veto. I saw Nancy Pelosi claim to be praying to her higher power (Karl Marx ?) for the president to discover his compassionate conservative heart and approve the SCHIP expansion. The Democrats are trotting out 12-year olds to ask the president why he doesn't want kids to get needed medical treatment, why he wants them to, sniff, die instead. Yesterday on the Chris Wallace program, that Schumer guy who is on TV every other day shook his head in sadness at the depth of Republican cruelty, as he listened to coldhearted GOP Grinch Trent Lott objecting to the taxpayers paying for the 700,000 adults who are covered under SCHIP, the taxpayers paying for the children of families making over $60K per year, the taxpayers picking up the health insurance tab for middle class families who can afford to pay for it themselves, and other such Republican trivialities. Chuck Schumer knows this is no time for a rational policy discussion. THIS IS ABOUT THE CHILDREN, man, and that should be the end of all discussion.